ALERT: Prevent your institution from being an unwitting partner in denial of service attacks

May 8, 2013
To: CIOs
REN-ISAC ALERT: Prevent your institution from being an unwitting
partner in denial of service attacks
The REN-ISAC [1] wants to raise awareness and drive change concerning
common network and domain name system (DNS) configurations that fall short
of accepted best practice and which, if left unchecked, open the door for
your institution to be exploited as an unwitting partner to crippling
denial of service attacks against third parties.
CIOs, please note important, specific recommended ACTIONS included below.
Although attacks exploiting the network and DNS configuration weaknesses
have been around for a long time, the frequency and impact of attacks have
grown over the past year. These attacks may exploit thousands of
institutional DNS servers to create an avalanche of network traffic aimed
at a third-party victim. The traffic sourced by any single institutional
system may be small enough to go unnoticed at the institution; however, the
aggregate experienced at the target can be crippling. A recent attack [2]
generated over 300 gigabits per second of traffic aimed at the victim
organization. To put that in context, most universities and organizations
connect to the Internet at 1 Gbps or less. In this incident not only was
the intended victim crippled, Internet service providers and security
service providers attempting to mitigate the attack were adversely
affected.
Given history and the success of recent attacks, we expect that attacks
will rise in frequency and magnitude in the months ahead.
The network configuration issue concerns the ability for a machine on your
network to send packets marked with a source IP address that doesn't belong
to you ("spoofed") to outside your network. The DNS issue concerns a
configuration that allows outsiders to exploit your DNS servers to send
high volumes of traffic at arbitrary target machines.
The higher education and research community needs to do its part to ensure
that we are not helping to facilitate these attacks. The REN-ISAC
recommends the following actions:
=== ACTIONS ===
1. Distribute a copy of this message to your network administrators,
information security staff, DNS administrators, and other relevant
personnel.
2. Ensure your institutional network(s) are unable to originate Internet
traffic with spoofed source addresses.
3. Do not permit any DNS server on your networks to answer queries from the
public Internet, with the exception of the institution's authoritative
servers, which should only answer queries about data they are authoritative
for.
4. Investigate rate limiting for your authoritative DNS servers. Rate
limiting becomes even more important for DNSSEC-enabled zones.
We're sharing a version of this letter, with additional technical depth and
recommendations, to campus security officers, network administrators, and
DNS administrators. This note and related technical notes are available at
the REN-ISAC web site, and have been sent directly to REN-ISAC members and
to the public EDUCAUSE Security and CIO mailing lists.
Reference: http://www.ren-isac.net/alerts.html
We'd appreciate your input on additional means to protect from this threat,
and general feedback concerning the Alert.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to e-mail us at
soc@ren-isac.net.
Special thanks go to the members of the REN-ISAC Technical Advisory Group
[3] for their work on this Alert.
On behalf of the REN-ISAC team,
Doug Pearson
dodpears@ren-isac.net
Technical Director, REN-ISAC
http://www.ren-isac.net
24x7 Watch Desk +1(317)274-7228
==========
References
==========
[1] REN-ISAC
http://www.ren-isac.net
[2] Firm Is Accused of Sending Spam, and Fight Jams Internet
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/technology/internet/online-dispute-becomes-internet-snarling-attack.html?pagewanted=all
[3] REN-ISAC Technical Advisory Group
http://www.ren-isac.net/about/advisory.html#technical
US-CERT Alert (TA13-088A) DNS Amplification Attacks
http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA13-088A
-o0o-